Art review: Group show at new gallery abounds with interesting work

Bottom line: Well-selected and mounted work in this contemporary gallery's inaugural exhibition bodes of good things to come.

The excitement surrounding the opening of Hathaway David Contemporary was palpable: fevered Facebook posts, endless photos of the packed opening night event and a general feeling that Atlanta had a contemporary art gallery opening for a change. Finally, here was a contemporary space doing something other than closing. For the past decade, Atlanta has seen the shuttering of many established spaces: Solomon Projects, Get This Gallery, Kiang Gallery, Fay Gold Gallery and Saltworks, among others.

There's no denying Hathaway David Contemporary, tucked into an Orange Crush-colored building behind the Westside restaurant Bocado, is just the kind of nicely appointed, well-located space to rekindle Atlanta's hopes for a Westside contemporary art nexus after many years of economic funk.

Hathaway David is 8,700 square feet of glossy concrete floors with boomtown Atlanta’s favorite scent wafting through the airy space: fresh paint. The gallery’s inaugural show, “All Tomorrow’s Parties,” which takes its name from a song by the quintessential New York art band the Velvet Underground, mashes up work by artists living in Atlanta and in Brooklyn.

Gallery co-founder Michael David (his co-founder is Laura Hathaway) founded the Bushwick Brooklyn gallery Life on Mars, and thus has ample familiarity with that NYC borough’s up-and-comers. One of the artworks in the show, Loren Munk’s “Bushwick Unfinished” in oil on linen, pays homage to that neighborhood’s art cred in a psychedelic-meets-pop painting in eye-popping colors, a kind of motherboard map breakdown of the galleries and artists that define that scene.

The show concept is a bit of an affirmative high-five to its Atlanta home base, placing regional artists on the same playing field with NYC-based artists who are often assumed to be their betters by virtue of proximity to art world mecca New York. The good news is, Atlanta holds its own, often offering far more socially engaged work inclined to dip into commentary on race, whether in William Downs’ sense of American history seen through a personal lens sketched out on splayed-open file folders or in Davion Alston’s photographs of the artist holding up a magnifying lens to his face, in what feels like an exercise in self-scrutiny and the sensation of being perpetually under the microscope.

The Brooklynites, meanwhile, tend to dominate when it comes to the expressive and formalist possibilities of painting. Curator David is a painter himself, and so clearly drawn to the genre. The Brooklyn contingent clearly excels at delving into endless iterations of painting, from Whitney Wood Bailey’s gorgeous cosmic-meets-Klimt explosions of color and texture, to Brenda Goodman’s lovely creepy and stunningly conflicted view of transition, “Almost a Bride,” to Todd Bienvenu’s trippy smashed perspective and manic energy in works like “High School Hi Jinks” of some age-appropriate goofball hedonism in TP’ed houses and skinny dipping.

An Atlanta artist is given front and center placement in "All Tomorrow's Parties" and offers one of the show's best works. Pam Longobardi's terrifying cornucopia of plastic takes that Thanksgiving horn of plenty and upends it, filling it with the plenitude of our waste. That harvest of bleach bottles and fishing buoys, plastic dolls and assorted junk spewing from a tar black cornucopia churns into a God's-eye web hung from the gallery ceiling, suggesting one of the floating islands of human-made debris circling the Earth's oceans.

Rather than simply an exhibition of newly minted hot shots, curator David has wisely chosen to include artists like Longobardi and other more established artists. Next to Longobardi’s striking work is an equally stunning work by Morehouse College grad (many of these Brooklyn artists have Atlanta roots) Sanford Biggers, whose haunting “Shepard” unfolds on a painted vintage quilt onto which the artist has superimposed a figure emerging like a ghost from its hypnotic pattern.

Despite a selection of over 30 artists, the work never feels too crowded, thanks to an enormous space and a welcome tendency not to pack the room. “All Tomorrow’s Parties” is less a show that teases out parallels between these Brooklyn and Atlanta artists and more proof that in our connected age, such divisions between artist communities may be becoming outmoded.